Читать книгу Dr. Jordan Peterson - Man of Meaning. Part 3. Revised & Illustrated Transcripts - Hermos Avaca - Страница 4

Hi there. This is my message to Millennials about how to change the world - and I would say how to change the world properly. Of course, the question then is "Well, exactly what do you mean by properly?" That is the fundamental issue.

So I'm going to walk through that a little bit. (...) This was triggered, in part, by something I read recently by Jonathan Haidt.

Jonathan Haidt is the professor of ethical leadership at the NYU Stern School of Business. He's been a very astute commentator recently on some of the political battles that have been going on in the social sciences. Noting, for example, that there is very little political diversity in the views of social scientists and, perhaps, even less on the part of the people in the humanities.

Haidt recently wrote something where he claimed that universities have to decide between social justice and truth.

And on the side of truth, he puts a philosopher named John Stuart Mill. An English philosopher who said

"He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion."

And then Jonathan Haidt juxtaposes John Stuart Mill with Karl Marx.

Karl Marx said:

"The Philosopher's have only interpreted the world in various ways.

The point is to change it."

He considers Marx the patron saint of Social Justice University, which is oriented around changing the world, in part, by overthrowing power structures and privilege. It sees political diversity as an obstacle to action.

Mill, on the other hand (according to Haidt) is the patron saint of what he calls, Truth U, which sees truth as a proces in which flawed individuals challenge each other's biased and incomplete reasoning - and, in the process, all become smarter. Haidt points out that Truth university dies when it becomes intellectually uniform or politically orthodox.

So, I guess this video is, in part, my call along with Jonathan Haidt for young people to join truth university. But there's a problem with that because... the university is where the truth has being sought that's the university. There's a problem... that is that young people want to change the world.

It's part of what Piaget (the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget) called the "messianic stage".

And there's some real utility in that because we're social creatures and as we construct ourselves, formulate ourselves, bring our own character into being - predicated on our biological platform, our biological being - we also simultaneously have to adjust to, to integrate with and negotiate with society! Which, sometimes, needs to be changed.

The structure of society has to be preserved, but it has to be updated and improved as it moves forward. So part of the problem is how to update and improve it, without doing that so rapidly that you destroy everything of any value.

Som the problem I have with the Marxist perspective (and I've had this problem with it for a long time) is that I don't think that you should trust people whose primary goal, when they're attempting to change the world for the better, is to change other people! You can tell who those people are because they're always blaming other people - and they're looking for victims. They're looking for perpetrators and victims and then they're going off to stop the perpetrators.

And I think that's wrong because, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said - he's a great Russian writer, who helped bring down the Soviet Union - he said: "The line between good and evil runs down every every humans heart."

So the real battle, as far as I'm concerned... and I think this goes along with the tradition in which John Stuart Mill is firmly placed in, is that: To overcome tyranny, malevolence, chaos and nihilism, and the desire to bring everything to a halt, you have to repair the fissures and the rift that's in your own soul, basically.

And that means that you have to confront the evil that lives in your own heart! There's a statement from the New Testament that, I think, is very much apropos with regards to this particular idea. And this is part of the Sermon on the Mount which is a central text in the Western tradition, I would say... obviously central to Christianity, but central to everything that Western civilization has built.

So Christ says to his followers:

"Why be holdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye!

Or how wilt thou say to thy brother let me pull out the mote out of thine eye and behold a beam is in thine own eye.

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye and then shalt thou see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother's eye!"

Well, I like that quote because it places the responsibility for change at every level of being on the individual - and, obviously, the individual interacts with society. But the idea here is that unless the individual straightens out his, or her, own soul, there's no possibility that the impact the individual can have on society can be anything but a harmful. In proportion to the harm that's still in the soul.

These are important things to know. They're vitally important things to know! But then we're faced with the conundrum that young people also want to change the world. But that's no problem because, I think, you could bring Truth University together with the desire to a make real change - but change has to start at the right place. So I'm going to tell you how I think you should change yourself, so that you can change the world. So that the world that you bring into being will be a better world and not a worse one.

Remember, you need to know about this: The world that the followers of Marx brought into being in the 20th century killed more than a hundred million people in China, in Russia and in places like Cambodia and Vietnam. The world certainly changed as a consequence of Marxist doctrine, but it didn't change in a good direction.

And, of course, the Marxist doctrine is making itself heard in a massive way across the West again now! So what should you do about that? Well, here's an idea:

The first thing you have to do is orient yourself. Now, you probably have all watched Pinocchio. Pinocchio is about how a marionette whose strings are being pulled by forces beyond his comprehension. That's the situation of the undeveloped individual. Geppetto, a benevolent father (so a benevolent a symbol of benevolent culture) makes a puppet, his son, and then wishes on a star.

A star is something that glitters up in the sky and it's associated with the transcendent, the beyond and the divine. And, you know, if you look up in the night sky and it's very dark, you get a feeling of awe. It's because you're confronting your soul, so to speak... your individual soul is confronting the cosmos and you can feel a relationship between you and the totality.

So looking up into the sky is like a religious experience, if it's a starry sky - and to wish upon a star is to find a light that orients you (like the North Star) and to pick the highest goal you can conceive of. That's what Geppetto does.

He raises his eyes above his his day-to-day concerns and tries to establish a relationship with the highest of all possible values. He has the most profound of wishes, and the most profound of wishes is that the puppet that he's created could become a genuine individual, a genuinely fully developed human being.

And that is what you can wish for yourself! You can wish and aim for that in yourself. You see, that's how you deal with the suffering that's attendant on life. Because life is suffering - and because life is very hard: People get sick, they become mentally ill, there's malevolence in the world and there's tragedy. So life is very, very hard.

And if you're not properly oriented with regards to life, the fact that it's hard, and the fact that it's full of suffering can warp and twist and bend you - until you become murderous and resentful... and even go beyond murderous and resentment: To wish for genocide, even to wish for the destruction of everything!

Thus, you have to learn how to strengthen yourself as an individual so that you can bear the burden of being without becoming corrupt.

You have to decide that that is what you're aiming for, that you want to become a fully developed human being and stop being a pathetic marionette, whose strings are being pulled by horrible forces behind the scenes.

So, I would say, to wish upon a star is to aim at the highest good. The question then is "Well, what is the good?" Well, we can answer that in two ways: We could say that the good is the opposite of evil - and I can tell you what evil is:

Evil is the conscious desire to produce suffering, where suffering is not necessary. If you read about what happened in the Nazi concentration camps, for example... or in the Russian concentration camps during the Soviet time of the Soviet Union, you'll get a good flavor for what constitutes evil!

And evil is also the desire to exploit the vulnerability of other people, to self-consciously exploit the vulnerability of other people and to elevate their suffering beyond their (or anyone's) ability to tolerate.

So the good is the opposite of that, whatever the opposite of that is. The good is harder to get a handle on, but here's one hint. I got this from reading Jean Piaget, partly. He was adevelopmental psychologist.

Piaget talked about the equilibrated state. And an equilibrated state is like a game children play, where every child wants to play the game. You have a little social group, that's the children's play group, and the individuals within it. Those are the individual children - and the structure is the game.

And it's a good game if everyone wants to play it. Piaget noted that a game like that will outperform a game that people have to be tyrannized to play because it doesn't require any enforcement cost.

So I've sort of developed the idea of the equilibrated state in this regard, to think that: If you're aiming at the good, then you want what's good for you... and I mean, good for you as if you were taking care of yourself and were good to yourself. You were treating yourself like someone you love.

...A behavior, that is good for you in a way that would also be good for your family. Then it would be good for you and your family in a way that was also good for society, and then it would be good for you and your family and society in a way that would be good for the world - and then it would be good now and it would be good next week and the week after and a year from now... and as long into the future as you can see!

So the good is something that's equilibrate across multiple levels of being, in multiple time frames simultaneously. And it isn't necessarily that you know what that is going to be, at any given moment - but you can orient yourself. That's the state that you want to exist in.

I can tell you, as far as I can tell: When you exist in that state, even moment by moment, your life is imbued with a sense of meaning. That sense of meaning can help you transcend suffering. The philosopher Nietzsche said "He, who has a why can bear any how." He who has a why can bear any how. And so Nietzsche's idea was that if there was purpose in your life of sufficient grandeur, that not only could the suffering in life be accepted, but maybe even be appreciated.

It could be that you're willing to bear the burden of being because of the exciting things that you can do with being, the things you can build and the things that you can bring about. That might be the highest imaginable state of being and that's a form of paradise. But it's not a paradise that you attain by transforming others, it's a paradise that you attain by transforming yourself!

That's a very difficult thing to do and it's a very frightening thing to do because it means that you're retooling your soul - that is the job for a forthright and honorable person. And it's an exciting enough task so that it will keep you occupied for the rest of your life!

Then, magical things will happen to you while you're doing it and the world will arrange itself around you in the most wonderful way, in a musical way, so that every part of what you're experiencing plays off against every other part, in a manner that has meaning embedded in every aspect of it.

And you experience that already now, by the way. You experience that when you listen to a piece of music that you love! Music represents that, that's why music nourishes the soul, that's why it's the highest form of art. At least in my opinion. So you have to live your life as if being is a symphony and you're playing your instrumental part.

Once you orient yourself, then you have an obligation, I would say. An obligation to the development of your soul, to speak the truth. You have to be oriented properly, though, because the truth is something that exists in service to an ideal

You can imagine that you could use your language two ways:

You can use your language to manipulate the world and to extract from it what you want. For example, maybe you go out on a date with someone and you decide that the end goal of the date is to have a sexual partner for the night - and then you can craft your language to manipulate the person into providing you with what you want. That's like an instrumental use of language.

But the problem with that... There's many problems with that, but one of them is: What if your idea about what you should want is wrong? Maybe that's not the way to treat someone that you're out on a date with. Maybe you're minimizing and reducing the interactions between you from what could be a healthy and elevated state of interaction and discourse, to something that's basically the pursuit of impulsive pleasure. And maybe that's not good for you, next week, the week after and a month down the road. Maybe orienting yourself towards impulsive pleasure is a very bad idea.

Remember what happens in Pinocchio: Pinocchio goes to Pleasure Island and Pleasure Island is a place where impulsive pleasures can be had at a moment's notice. But what Pinocchio discovers (along with Jiminy Cricket) is that Pleasure Island is run by masked totalitarians.

They're all dressed in black, they're depriving the children and adolescents who are on Pleasure Island of their voice, turning them into brain jackasses and prepare to sell them as slaves to the salt mines. And so, there's an implication in that story that the pursuit of impulsive pleasure is one route to totalitarianism and slavery!

And I believe that! So, perhaps orienting your language towards the gathering of the impulsive pleasure is a misuse of your highest gift, the gift of Logos, the gift of communication. The alternative is to orient yourself towards the highest good, as we already described, and then: Speak the truth!

You can tell when you're doing that because... Or you can tell, when you're not doing that because if you're not telling the truth, if you're using someone else's words, you're being manipulated by forces that are behind the scenes.

If you're not using your own words, you're the puppet of an ideology, of another thinker or of your own impulsive desires. You can tell when you're speaking like that because it makes you feel weak. It makes you feel weak and ashamed! You can localize that feeling physiologically. If you listen to yourself talk, you can tell.

When you're speaking properly, you will experience a feeling of integration and strength. And when you're speaking in a deceitful or manipulative manner, you'll feel that you're starting to come apart at the seams - and what you need to do is practice only saying things that make you feel stronger.

And by that, I mean: When you begin with that, you'll notice that almost everything you say is a lie. It's either a lie or someone else's words. It's very hard to find your own words, but you don't actually exist until you have your own words!

Then you try to teach yourself how to speak your own truth and you listen to other people while you're doing that because they can help you shape and correct your words. They'll react to them badly if you formulate your ideas badly. And if you listen and pay attention then you can learn to formulate your words more and more clearly and accurately, and that makes you more and more powerful. It gives you more and more authority which is the beneficial form of power.

Okay, so you do that and then you have to make a decision of faith. That's basically... well, that you can either use your language to manipulate the world and make it do what you want - or you can use your language to try to articulate the truth as carefully as you possibly can.

And then you can see what happens. You have to let go of your desire for the consequences that you want. You have to assume that if you speak the truth, the results are the best that are possible under the circumstances. So it's an exciting way of living. In some sense it's like continually walking off a cliff because you don't know what's going to happen next, if all you do is to say what you think, you know.

Maybe you're at work, you say what you think and you get fired! Then you think "Oh my god, that's a terrible catastrophe!" But maybe it's not because if you're working somewhere and you have to lie to maintain your job, maybe you shouldn't be there. Maybe it's deadening your soul and damaging you in some permanent manner and making you corrupt.

So, you have to orient yourself, you have to speak the truth as carefully as you can. You have to listen to others so that you correct your speech - and then you have to allow the consequences that ensue, to unfold as they will. That's the ultimate act of faith, I would say!

And that's what you do if you belong to Truth University. Alright.

So more practically speaking, you should educate yourself. It's not that easy to do now because you have to find people who can actually tell you what to read and maybe also how to write. Because writing is a way of formulating your thoughts ever more precisely.

That's why you go to university, to learn how to write. If you know how to write, you can think! If you can think and speak and communicate in writing, you're unbelievably powerful in the authority manner - because arguments move the world forward! And if your arguments are tight, well-constructed, lucid and well edited and carefully thought through... and you have five rationales for everything that you're doing (which is what happens if you learn to write properly)... then you're like a force of nature, man! No one can take you down!

And that's one of the things that people aren't taught about while you get educated. Especially in the humanities. Humanities education, if it's real, organizes your psyche, grounds you, puts you on a rock and makes you a force to contend with.

But you have to read the right people, and so... Those are the great people of the past.

In my list, they're the great men of the past, that's just how it is. And so, here's who I would recommend... I put reading lists up at JordanBPeterson.com, there's two of them. The people that I recommend, primarily, are the books written by the followed list of people :

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, who I think was perhaps the greatest novelists the world has ever seen, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, another great Russian novelist...

I don't know what it is about the Russians, but man, they produce writers that are incomparable. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a book called The Gulag Archipelago, where he analyzed the Soviet prison camp system that arose after the Leninist Revolution in the second decade of the 20th century. And he details absolutely precisely how the tenets of Marxism... the Marxist tenets that are supposed to free everyone and change the world, produced legislation that was absolutely murderous in its consequences.

And Solzhenitsyn painstakingly traces the logical pathway from the original Marxist principles, to the legislation, to the genocides. Because you'll hear Marxists say things like "Well, true Marxism never existed!" - and Solzhenitsyn took that bad argument apart in the mid-70s. The Gulag Archipelago was an intellectual bomb!

It demolished any credibility that Marxism had, any intellectual respectability. You have to read the book! The book is about the central issue in our culture at the moment. If you don't read it, you're not informed and you can't participate in the debate - except as a puppet.

I wouldn't recommend participating in this debate as a puppet because you don't know who's behind the scenes, pulling the strings. If you remember the Pinocchio story, the forces that were pulling the strings were not forces that were acting in Pinocchio's best interest, that's for sure.

George Orwell, english essayist, incomparable commentator on socialist totalitarianism. Even though he was a left winger and a brilliant one.

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, he had some very brilliant things to say about the potential demolition of choice of sexual partner, as part of a dystopian future.

Friedrich Nietzsche: A philosopher who described himself as "Someone who thought with a hammer." Nietzsche is a very, very dangerous person and an absolutely brilliant writer. And Carl Jung, who was a student of Nietzsche, and who...

Nietzsche was the philosopher who announced the death of god back in the late 1800s and Jung spent his whole life attempting to revivify god, that's one way of thinking about it.

If you or educate yourself, this is a really good place to start. If you read these authors, then you'll know what else to read. If you read these authors, it'll take you a good long time and it will be very, very hard on you and you won't be the same person, when you come out. And that's very frightening because being torn down and rebuilt is no joke!

But it beats the hell out of the alternative - which is just to stagnate and stay as a 'stagnant infant', which is not something I 'd recommend. There's nothing uglier than a stagnant 40-year old infant. That's equivalent, just so you know, to Pinocchio.

Back to the Pinocchio story, rescuing Geppetto from the underworld. Remember, he had kind of turned into a half jackass, after being at pleasure island. Where he was enticed, by the way...

That was the fox and the cat, who attempted to entice him into believing that he was a victim and needed a vacation. So Pinocchio was enticed onto Pleasure Island by two figures that played on his sense of victimization, neuroses and suffering, to convince him that he didn't have to take any responsibility for his own existence. He could just busy himself with impulsive pleasures, right? That's how he fell into the hands of the totalitarians on Pleasure Island. Anyways.

Pinocchio, after he left Pleasure Island, had to go into the ocean twice and the second time he went into the ocean, he was looking for his father. Well, everyone's father (from a mythological perspective) is dying in the underworld, in the chaos. Because everyone inhabits a culture that's sick and old, so to speak. And it's sick and old because it was made by the dead - and the living have to revivify it, continually, in order for it to be a dynamic force.

The living have to revivify their connection with the culture internally, too, because you're constructions of culture (although not only constructions of culture) and you have to understand history because otherwise you can't understand yourself: You're a historical creature, and so you have to rescue your dead father from the belly of the beast, from the dragon.

Because, remember: The whale in Pinocchio is also a fire-breathing dragon. That means, you have to face the thing that you most fear - and when you do that, you'll rescue your father from the underworld.

These are very complex ideas and you can read about them in my book Maps of Meaning, if you want. It's on the reading list, I put a free copy of it on JordanBPeterson.com, so you can download it. In the book, I take apart these sorts of things in detail.

Anyways, you have to revivify your father before you can become real - and that's part of the problem with the the feminists' and social justice warriors' insistence on the existence of the patriarchy. It's like:

Everyone's known since the beginning of time that culture is corrupt and tyrannical, but it's also protective and benevolent. Even the language we use is a product of culture. And so, you don't overthrow the patriarchy - you revivify your culture!

And you do that by adopting responsibility for your own being, and then acting as a moral agent in the culture. That's what you do to become educated, so...

Read these books! Read these books. They'll change your life, I guarantee it. They'll change your life! They'll take you apart, they'll devastate you and then they'll rebuild you into something far greater than you are now!

That's what to aim for. And here's something that will help you: My colleagues and I have developed a series of online writing programs called the Self Authoring Suite, and they help people write about their past and organize that, their present personality and organize and understand that, and then the future. The Future Authoring Program asks you to write about six different dimensions of your life.

It asks you first of all: Treat yourself as if you're someone that you want to help, someone that you love and take care of and someone that you want to help. And then it asks you: If you could if you could organize your life in the best possible manner, keeping with those principles we've discussed earlier:

What do you want?

 What do you want for your career?

 What would make your life meaningful?

 What do you want for your family - and from your family?

 What do you want for an intimate relationship?

 How are you going to take care of your mental and physical health?

 How are you going to handle drug and alcohol use?

It asks you a series of fundamental questions like that to get your mind moving Then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about what your life could be like 3 to 5 years in the future, if it was laid out like you were laying out a life for someone you deeply cared about.

You're asked to write for 15 minutes about that, without worrying too much about the structure of the argument or any grammatical niceties. That's put off for later. So that gives you a little 'heaven' to aim for, right? It's like, "Well, if I could have this, my life would be clearly worthwhile, even if I had to put up with a fair bit of suffering along the way!"

That's what you're trying to construct. And you can think about that as a heaven worth moving towards. Then, the second part of the program asks you to write about what your life would be like 3 to 5 years down the road if all of your bad habits, your nihilistic tendencies, your proclivity towards resentment and your lack of desire to shoulder responsibility...

If all your weak points got the upper hand and just oggered you into the ground - and everyone knows that. You know what you'd be like, if you just let everything slide, and you know what particular hell you were heading towards.

And so, the second part of the program asks you to write about what your life would be like 3 to 5 years down the road, if everything just went to hell around you. So that gives you a 'hell' to avoid and a 'heaven' to strive for. You need both of those because that's what keeps you properly motivated in life.

The next part of the program helps you turn your vision of the desirable future into an implementable reality and to articulate it fully and to articulate the arguments for why you want that.

Those even help you overcome your own doubts, right? It's not only to argue against other people, it's to argue against the chattering demons of nihilism and hopelessness and ideological possession that exist in your mind and in society simultaneously. You need powerful weapons to fight back against those!

(...)

If you go to Selfauthoring.com, you can read about the program there. I got to tell you we've used this program on about 5,000 University students so far. Mostly in Holland, but some in Canada as well.

And what we've shown is that if you complete this program, even if you do it badly... and I would recommend: Do it badly! It doesn't matter, you don't have to do it perfectly. Do it badly and then maybe do it better as you move forward - but at least do it badly

It increases the performance of university students, it increases their grades between 20 and 25 percent - and decreases their dropout by about the same percentage. We have data on 5000 people, one of those papers has been published and I'll put that in the description of this video. So, this program really works if you do it and I would highly recommend that you do it. (...)

Here's what millennials should do if they want to change the world: The first thing they should do is orient themselves to the good. And that's away from evil, away from malevolence, away from the manufacture of pointless suffering and pain, away from Auschwitz, away from the Gulag Archipelago and the terrible Soviet camps and the massive murders that occurred in China.

You want to get as far away from that as you possibly can. Whatever direction is away from that is a good direction. And then you also want to contemplate what the highest possible good could look like for you and your family and your society. We already discussed that.

Then, you need to speak the truth in relationship to that. And you need to educate yourself and then you need to shoulder your responsibility. Responsibility is a good thing because it makes you stronger.

It makes you strong, you can free yourself from your strings and turn yourself into a genuine individual. And then you can shoulder the world and then you're in a position to make change!

As a person like that, your mere being will change the world in a positive direction. That's what you should be aiming for! So, read the books that I put up on my site and do the Future Authoring Program. That will improve your life dramatically - and that's how you can change the world!